My Wonderful Apprenticeship- A Minecraft Fanfic
by Blak
Summary: Mira just wants to live her dream- become an immortal superhuman who can punch down a tree and kill zombies with her bare hands. There's only one obstacle- she has no natural talent in the arts of power whatsoever. Oh, and there's a eight-foot black skeleton who leaves only death in his wake and can call upon the hordes of hell to do his bidding hunting her down.
1. Prologue

Heya.

Minecraft story. Things happening. Violence definitely. Swears occasionally. Sexy times not to be found.

I'm expecting putting a story up here to be like spitting into the ocean, as opposed to the MC forums where it's more like spitting into someone's cup, but we'll see. Any and all R&R, even so harshly negative it's basically hate, is appreciated as long as it's explained.

Prologue.

_In the beginning, there was nothing._

_There was no light, no life, no land and no law._

_And then there was the Jhavoor._

"Where iss sshe?" The kick that struck Acklan in the stomach was strong enough to crack rock, and made with a shin of bare bone. He was sent skidding backwards across the rain-slick dirt road and hit the bank with a resounding _thwap_ of oiled leather hitting mud. "Where the hell iss sshe?" He was picked up by the collar of his coat and slammed repeatedly into a tree before being effortlessly held a good half-metre off the ground.

He coughed violently. "I don't know! I don't know who you're…"

"Wrong ansswer!"

He went sailing through the air before landing with a grating skid on the ground. He coughed again and winced with the action- he had felt some of his old ribs crack with that impact. He heard his horse Duncan whinnying in terror at the apparition that was throwing him around like a bag of old sticks, and below Duncan's horrified screams the _hiss_ as rain steamed where it struck the apparition's scalding hot drum-taught skin.

"Sshut UP!"

Acklan turned himself over, half-slipping in the mud. The creature, whatever it was, was advancing on Duncan, sword raised. The horse thrashed and kicked, but it couldn't escape the cart it was pulling, and it couldn't pull the cart itself on account of the broken, blazing wheel that the monster had broken as it first appeared.

"Ssilence!" the terrible black sword came up in a swoop, trailing grey fire. It cut through the horse's neck without slowing and went on to bifurcate a significant portion of its skull. The severed part fell to the floor with a thud and a hiss.

And then the desiccation started.

The grey fire spread across the horse's body. Where it touched the gelding's hide the fur blackened and dried, tightening across Duncan's former skeleton. After maybe seven seconds the horse had withered away to some horrible aberration of sloughing skin and gleaming black bone.

Then, with a creak, it fell into pieces, collapsing into a pile of burnt hide and broken bones.

The creature turned its gaze on him and began striding towards him, its oversized limbs bringing it across the intervening distance disturbingly quickly. He panicked, scrabbling backwards through the mud.

Not fast enough.

The creature reached down and took him by the neck in one bony hand. It lifted him up again so that his feet dangled in the air and they were at each other's eye level…

Should have been at each others eye level.

Instead of eyeballs the creature had bleak, empty sockets. There was nothing in those eyes, not even the white of bone like you'd find in the eyes of a skeleton- there was nothing but absolute, total darkness.

The wither skeleton opened its mouth, skin already pulled tight over its oversized skull somehow finding room to stretch further. It opened its fanged, tongueless mouth, and against all laws of nature spoke to him again.

"Where. Iss. Sshe?"

From somewhere, Acklan realised he had drawn a tiny last bit of courage. He spat at the creatures face, and it was a good spit, with the perfect power and aim and everything.

"Fuck. You. Monster."

The wither skeleton sighed, and the last thing Acklan felt before the withering began was the cut of its blade biting into his neck.


	2. Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE.

_And the Jhavoor drew things from outside all things._

_And the chipped one appeared._

_And from it he made gods._

_Fig 12.1, The 'Serpit Reicio', the common or garden Creeper, is renowned as being amongst the most dangerous of the gods' creations. _

"Uh-huh."

_Weighing in at an around ninety kilograms for a fully matured female of breeding age, Creepers make their homes in dark caves and…_

"Uh-huh."

_…deep forests their body …forty percent explosives with a higher effective payload than five…_

"Uh-huh."

_… not tnt… non-volatile… dangerous… male to female… counter-insemination… proboscis jaw… monochrome vision… scales comparab… leather…_

"Uh… hm."

She was skipping words involuntarily again, well that was a good a sign as any that her always limited pool of attention was running dry.

Mira sighed, closed her book, and stowed it back in her pack. She stopped leaning on the tree and, still sitting cross-legged held a hand out beyond its boughs to check how badly it was raining. It came back with the sleeve of her cotton smock sticking to her arm, drenched through.

She sighed again and sat back against the tree. Rain was never nice, and she still had some kilometres to go in her journey. It had taken a few months so far, and she was running out of food and money from her pack.

She took inventory again.

_Two (2) shirts, white and blue, cotton, slightly foxed._

_One (1) pair of leggings, brown, in good repair._

_One (1) book, "All the beasts of the gods", severely battered._

_Thirty-five (35) red triangle dollars, the remains of five hundred._

_Two (2) slices of pumpkin pie, one half-eaten._

Not a lot. Not enough to get her back to her home at any rate. He prospective master had better take her in, or…

Or she'd find a way. That's what her mother had always said. Find a way.

Of course, she didn't say it anymore. She didn't say anything anymore, thank god.

They'd burned her pretty thoroughly.

There was a rapid crunching of grass nearby, and she looked to see a spider barrelling across the plains, looking for shelter from the rain. It was… terrible. Horrible. As long as a man was tall, and just as wide rom the tips of its legs to each other. Its entire abdomen and skull were covered in fine black fur that contrasted strongly with its shining chitinous black legs, its eight blood-red eyes and its gleaming white fangs.

She waved to it to beckon it over and it came, scuttling towards her with all of its considerable speed. It took shelter beside her, soaked to the bone, looking thoroughly dejected.

"aw, look at you!" Mira chirped. "Like a drowned rat." She removed one of her shirts from the bag and proceeded to use it to dry the poor arachnid off. "I'll never understand why people are afraid of you lot, you've never done me any harm. At least you don't have VMH, hey?" she laughed, finished drying the spider, and brushed the few bits of hair it had lost off her shirt. "There, all nice and dry."

The spider made a small, gravelly noise.

"Well, I'm sure I don't know what that meant, but I choose to believe it was thanks." She sat back against the tree as the spider nuzzled into her waist, such as it was, as something poked into her other side. She turned, and there was a much smaller spider doing the same as the larger one, although it was still soaked through. There were another four behind it.

"Aww, you have babies, hey?" she smiled and took up her shirt, whiling away the storm drying baby spiders.

And a fair dozen kilometres away a horse lost its head.

/

It's pitch black here. There is no light, none at all. Daylight was left some hundred metres above here. Torchlight went around three caverns ago. It. Is. Pitch. Black.

But this man still moves as if he can see. To him it must be as twilight at worst. All six foot nothing of him moves with confidence, there is no feeling for the wall his pick strikes, and his footing is as sure a can be.

Which is odd.

What's more odd is what happens when the pick hits the rock of the wall. It doesn't chip away at it like a normal miner. Instead the iron spike is driven into the stone until rock wall hits wooden handle, and then the entire thing is wrenched out, tearing an enormous chunk of stone with it.

The miner pauses and brushes away some stone dust. Below is something crumbling and black that turns to powder in his fingers.

"Thank the five." Rings out across the cave, neatly masking the light footsteps of something utterly inhuman behind him.

/

Mira opened her eyes.

It had stopped raining. Or at least it was stopping. She'd fallen asleep for a period of time she couldn't hope to guess at, but certainly long enough to let the spider wander of, uninterested.

Alone again. It had been a lonely journey. Well, start as you mean to go on. She stood up, dusted off her caboose, and left the shelter of the tree.

As she set off, so close to her destination now, she smiled. Most people would have said an eleven year old girl couldn't make it this far alone, couldn't travel for three months on and off road with only what she could carry. Her father had definitely thought that- he'd been quite emphatic about it in fact. He'd said that the only way she was going to find Kahl was if the white-eyed king took her himself.

He'd said it was suicide

She'd given him a look that was far too old for someone not even in their teens and told him "that's the point."

The grass crunched wetly under her feet as she walked, stepping around the cowpats and the aimless creatures that had created them. She stopped and picked a daisy, working it into her blonde hair as she walked. It was pretty here on the plains- the grasslands stretched for kilometres in every direction until they met the neighbouring biomes. She couldn't quite see what was in the east, as it was obscured by some lowlying hills, but in the north ahead of her there were some of the biggest mountains she'd ever seen, hulking great masses of grey stone that speared high into the sky. On her left the plains gave way far in the distance to an icy tundra, and behind her was the birch forest she'd come from, the one that the road wound through the middle of.

She stopped for a moment and took a deep breath. Yes, it was nice here. Better than the land around the cities, where there was all that smog and quarries were dug into the-

There. Noise. Look.

She turned, quickly. There was a large pit on her right, the type she'd grown so used to she didn't even see them anymore. There was a zombie in it, hiding just inside the shade provided by the overhanging rock. It was badly decayed- there was only one eye left, and it was the milky-white that eyes went when their owner stopped blinking and the scratches started to accumulate. Patches of bloody rib were showing through the tattered remains of its shirt and its skin was missing in other places too, most notably the crown of its skull which was a gleaming bone-white. Its jaw was held on by only one side's ligaments. It moaned at her again, hungry and angry but too afraid of the sun to leave the cave.

Mira reached down, picked up a stone, tested its weight, and threw it overarm at the zombie's head. It bounced off its skull with a _clack_.

"Go back to your hell, monster!"

She turned and sprinted off north again. These plain were pretty, but they certainly not safe.

But at least they were above ground.


	3. Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO.

_And He looked upon the first._

_"You shall be light." He decreed._

_"You shall seek to illuminate."_

It was still dark in the cave.

And then it wasn't.

Orange light, weak when compared to almost any other source but in comparison to the eternity of pitch-darkness here almost incomparably blinding, flared out from a torch in the wall.

The man who had lit it turned away from the rockface. He was slightly above average height- six foot, maybe six foot one at the outside- with matted black hair streaked with grey that reached down to his shoulders as well as a beard that had evidently been, like the hair, cut with shears. He wore mottled mid-thigh length grey robes, well-washed but fraying at the edges, especially around the rim of the hood that was currently cast back onto his shoulders.

As for his face… his most starling feature was his lack of them, specifically his lack of a right eye and a small but noticeable part of the bridge of his nose. The other eye was very wide, but in this case it was with surprise.

Because he was looking at a Creeper.

Six feet tall and two wide, covered in leathery green scales and without a discernible torso, just a central pillar of muscle and ribs supporting a head without a jaw. Four legs arranged splayed at its base, each one tipped with an enormous claw of polished bone that rested impossibly lightly on the stone floor. Its face was perhaps the worst part of the whole disgusting pile- two sockets without eyes, just tiny red stalks, and a toothless cavity below them that was in every way an awful parody of a grimacing mouth.

It was moments like this when everything you knew, everything you _were_, came down to one action.

_A punch to the throat confuses and chokes a Creeper for a fraction of a second._

_A slug to the midsection will, if placed correctly, disrupt its detonator sack._

_A two-handed, open-palmed impact on the upper body will send it skittering backwards._

The three blows came in such quick succession that by the time the Creeper's sluggish reptilian mind acknowledged the first hit it was already in a body that was sailing backwards across the cavern. It hissed, twisting in midair so that its bone-claws hit the wall behind it first. Its legs bent like leaf springs, compressing the Creeper's strength for a fraction of a second before it shot back at the man, glowing white as it primed its first and final detonation. The man would die, his body would be scattered in bloody chunks, and the Creeper's children would eat of his…

He had a bow. Where did he get a bow?

_Ducking an airborne Creeper's lunge will avoid it._

_A well timed arrow through the mouth will incapacitate it._

_A punch II bow will send a Creeper well out of blast range._

The Creeper flew diagonally upwards, pulled along against every law of nature by the arrow itself. It continued like this until it reached the furthest upper corner of the cavern from its target.

At this point it realised, terrified, that it was far, far too late to abort its detonation.

The man averted his eyes as the cave was lit by the blinding light of the Creeper's explosion, and kept them turned away as stone dust sleeted past him. Lumps of rock fell to the uneven floor, and the shockwave blew the torch's flame away, bringing the dark once again.

"Gods, I hate those."

The man turned back to the torch and cupped his hands around the lump of coal at its head. Words were muttered more to the effect of "sodding torches" than anything specifically mystical, and his hands turned dull red as light tried to force its way out through his fingers.

"There, that should do-"

There was a stabbing pain in the back of his scalp for the barest instant before the pain continued in a laser-straight line through his skull and out through his right eyesocket. There was a wet feeling across his right cheek, and he felt the hot iron smell of blood surge up his nose. His faced creased up with a wince.

"Ow."

He turned to see a vision in green and blue leap from the crater the Creeper had made high up the wall and come sprinting towards him as fast as its decomposed legs would allow, accompanied by two who fitted a similar description. Each one was a dead human in the old turquoise clothes of The Before, and each one was certainly pumped up to their decomposed eyeballs with VMH. Here, this far from the surface, they'd passed gods only knew how many years without ever seeing sun, and as such were of a very high calibre when it came to the undead.

The first took the haft of his pick to the face and stumbled away, face pulverised and leaking brain. The miner ducked under the second zombie's outstretched arms and brought the tip of his pick up in a sweep that sent it into the undead's armpit, through its leathery skin and into whatever vital organs it still had in there.

Where it stuck.

At this point an idiot would have struggled with the pick, trying to remove it before he third zombie arrived. If… _when _they failed they'd be looking at a bite, maybe more than one. Even if Landstriders were immune to VMH, that was an unappetizing prospect.

Instead, the man swept his foot out. The zombie tripped and fell, putting its skull in the perfect place for his boot. Its head burst like a melon beneath his sole.

He stopped to take stock of the area for a moment. The first zombie was in the corner of the cavern- it had stumbled blindly for a while before the critical parts of its brain had finally given up. The third was dead. Very dead. The second continue squirming until he put one hand on the handle of the pick, one foot on the zombie's chest, and _heaved._

That only left the…

An arrow whistled over his left shoulder, cutting a light scratch through the cloth.

…skeleton.

He threw himself into a roll to dodge the next inevitable arrow, and it clattered into the stone floor in front of him. He turned to face the bony archer high up in the cave's wall.

"Oh, get lost." He reached into his empty eyesocket, felt around for the flint tip of the arrow he knew was in there. He found it and drew it out, wincing as he did so. It came free with an extended _shlup_, a small trickle of brain, and a large spout of blood.

More arrows came at him as he notched it calmly in his bow. He dodged them with the smallest of movements, jerking his head or torso slightly to the left or right.

The arrow sailed from the bow and through the skeleton's torso. Its bones fractured around it, and it fell into fragments.

The miner turned and left.

/

The house was…

Underwhelming.

Mira's mother had raised her like her brothers before her, with surprisingly few distinctions. There had been a few… _different_ talks on a few subjects, but mostly she'd had their upbringing, and all the dirt and fighting that came with it.

And that had included the stories of the Landstriders.

Monseye and Esilw, the fools with the army of armies at their back. Ozone, and the gold that smeared like soap. The mischievous and deadly Thunder of the Adecision who spread chaos in his wake like a fiery cape. They and lesser ones of their kind were renowned for their skills at construction- vast, impossible edifices that reached into the sky with fingers of gold and diamond. Structures so massive and impressive that entire cities sprung up around them when their original occupants had moved on.

This… was not that. Not even close.

It wasn't bad. In fact, it was quite nice. A small wooden lodge built into the side of a small cliff. There was only one floor, but a steeply peaked roof that hinted at a large attic. Its windows were relatively small, but it seemed bright enough inside with the shutters open as they were. It was south-facing, and nicely caught the sun on what lawn it had between a small pasture of various animals and what looked like an efficient melon farm. Wheat grew in strict rows beyond the rest of the agricultural space, and beyond them…

Mira walked over to them, skipping every third step. She had no idea what they were. Brown seed pods hanging from trees she didn't recognise in the slightest. They were round and-

Footsteps.

To the right of the house there was a small stone hut, sloped at its back. She hadn't looked into it yet, but there were footsteps leaking from between its closed doors. Considerably more footsteps than such a small building would warrant.

She crouched behind the strange tree, peering between its low-lying leaves at the doors. This could be Kahl, or it could be literally anyone else. A zombie, perhaps, or even another Landstrider. She knew they fought at times; Pervurpa her mother's stories had called it. Ambushes and traps and blows that could shatter rock being taken like it was nothing. That was not something she wanted to be caught in the middle of.

The door opened, and her breath caught in her throat. The person that stepped through was bedraggled in the extreme, with most of his face and upper robes caked in half-dried blood. His step was slightly staggered, and as he closed the door he stopped moving for a brief moment, swaying slightly as he caught his balance. He took a deep breath, coughed, and made his way over to the house. His hand paused on the doorknob.

"Why?" He asked, speaking seemingly to the door "Are you hiding behind my tree?"

There as a long silence.

"Your tree, hey?" Mira stood up carefully, ready to bolt at any moment. "So this is your house. Are you Kahl, hey?"

The man nodded. "A house I don't recall inviting you to." He turned around and she hid behind the tree again before he saw her. "Hang on, are you from that village?"

She nodded before she realised he couldn't see that. "Yeah, I was…"

"The smith's daughter."

"Yep." She gulped. "You told me you were looking for an apprentice. You _are_ Kahl, hey?"

"I did?" He scratched his head. Blood flakes fell like dandruff.

"Uh-huh." She stepped out from behind the tree. "You said you would teach anyone with the skill, and I know how to smelt, and cast, and mine, and I can carry a lot and I don't eat much and spiders and creepers and silverfish don't give me problems andIdon'tscareeasilyandIreallreallyreallywanttobeaLandstriderlikeyouandpleasetakemeon…" She took a second to breathe. "Please?"

The man looked at her. Short, round-faced, blonde hair cut at her ears, big brown eyes, no more than twelve years old. Stronger than she first appeared too- you could tell by the way the sleeves hung around the bicep. Small burn scar in the palm of her left hand. Green cotton smock, grubby and frayed but often patched. Big brown leather boots.

Grew up with brothers, spent most of her life keeping up with them. Enjoys rough games, she certainly must play them enough. Curious nature too, even when it's to her detriment.

And she was smart enough and dedicated enough to find him.

"It's not as simple as wanting to be one of… what I am." He said. "You have to really work hard for it."

She nodded. "I know. I will."

"And you have to have a dream…"

"Of course I had a dream. Otherwise I wouldn't be here!"

He looked up at the sun, and didn't have far to look. It was big and turned the sky blood-red on the horizon.

"The sun's setting. You can stay the night at least. I'll make my decision in the morning." He turned and opened the door. "If I do decide to give you a try, that won't be the end of it. There will be tests. They will be hard. You are not even close to in the clear yet." He stepped through. "And yes, I am Kahl. Remember it."

The girl shrugged. "Good enough"

The sun set on what Mira hoped to be the last day of her old life.

And, in a sense, it was.

But there are dreams and there are _dreams._


	4. Chapter 3

CHAPTER THREE

_And He looked upon the second._

"_You shall be Land." He said._

"_You shall seek to create."_

The next morning, as every morning since Light returned to the First Man, the sun rose across the world.

In every place it rose in the same instant. Be there a difference of a meter or a billion, the sun lit the world and burned away the creatures of the night everywhere at once.

Almost immediately after the first light touched Kahl's stone shed he was out of its doors, rotating a shoulder that seemed to have taken a sizable sword strike around the collarbone area, but that was already closing up.

"Good morning, world." He groaned. "What surprises do you have for me today?"

He'd spent the night in the mines. He didn't get tired, although he was of course capable of sleep. His bed had been occupied by his guest, and he hadn't felt like spending the few minutes it would take to build a new room.

"Sugar?" He looked down. The girl, the one from yesterday… Mira… was standing in front of him with both arms wrapped around a bushel of canes. "They looked over a meter tall, which my dad always said was when you should cut them, so I cut them down with a machete I found in your box!" she shifted her grip on them to one arm. "Here." She passed him the machete.

Blade first.

"Don't bother testing me, girl." He reached down and took it with his left hand, fingers closing around the sharp edge. As he stood up the machete vanished from his hand. He held it open- fingers splayed. "I'll pass." There were no cuts.

Mira's eyes were wide. "So, it's true you can do that. Will I be able to?"

He shrugged, extending his right arm. "Perhaps, it's simple enough." The machete appeared in his extended hand. "But for now, we'll be focusing on the tests." He turned and pointed at a box by the door. "Put the canes in there, then meet me on the top of the cliff behind the house."

Mira followed his instructions to the letter. By the time she reached him there was a pit exactly three metes cubed dug into the ground of the clifftop. Kahl was crouched at the bottom of the hole, passing his hand over the loose soil. The fragments of dirt vanished as his open palm passed them.

"Absorption." He said, without looking up at her. "Same principle as with the machete. Well, in a sense at least." He stood up and held out a hand. She took it and he helped her down.

"What's that for?" _That_ was a piece of white cloth held at eye-height on the side of the pit. It was clearly draped around something flush to the edge of the hole- a painting perhaps, or a sign.

"That is for the test of light, which is what you're about to do." Kahl walked to the corner and crouched, hand to the floor. The earth beneath him rumbled, and he slowly rose back up to ground level on a pillar of dirt. "I'm going to block all the light out of this pit. Once I have, remove the sheet and tell me what the sign beneath it says."

Mira nodded. "Okay, will do."

Kahl made eight quick motions with his right hand, and everything went dark. Pitch black. No light at all.

Mira turned, and felt for where she remembered the cloth was. After a short fumble, it was in her hands, and then it was on the floor in an invisible heap. She peered at the space she assumed was behind it.

She couldn't read anything.

She couldn't even _see_ anything. The absence of any kind of light in the pit turned everything into the same featureless blackness. She could see nothing because there was nothing to see _by_.

Ten minutes passed. Mira sat with her eyes closed, attempting to adjust her night vision. It didn't get her anywhere. She tried again.

Still nothing. And now even more time had passed.

"What's it say?" Kahl's voice was muffled almost to imperceptibility by the metre of soil between them.

She sighed in the total darkness "I… I don't know."

There was a silence. "Do you want some more time?"

"Would it help?"

Another silence. "Probably not."

"Then no thank you."

"Alright." There was a _krump,_ and light flooded into the pit, illuminating where Kahl's arm had punched clean through a meter of dirt. The soil around it vanished into wherever the absorption ability put things, and he hauled her out by her hand. "Up you come, girl."

She dusted herself off. "So are we done with that test now?"

"I'll have to fill in the pit later to stop anything nasty popping up in it, but yeah." Kahl crouched down to look the girl in the eye. "So, how do you think it went?"

Mira looked at the floor and kicked her feet idly, a habit that came up whenever she knew he was going to get scolded. "Not great."

"No. Not great at all. Could you really not see anything in there, girl?" She shook her head. Kahl sighed. "Come on then. Next test. Land."

/

Sister Skani looked into the pit. The power that was coming, it had to come from somewhere. Who-

"_I sought, and I found!"_

"_You found a grave! "_

"_I am the one truth left now. None can hold me!"_

"_The creeper king is come!"_

"_All your resistance, all your strength… It's NOTHING!"_

"_Terawatt… cannon!"_

"_Welcome to the End of the universe."_

"_You're wrong, it's the one you'll die in!"_

"_THE. CORRUPTION. CREEPS."_

She screamed.

/

"Land is simple." Kahl explained. "Lady Land gives us but one of our skills. Light lets us see in the dark and manipulate redstone. Law gives us matter levitation and, if we're exceptionally devoted to the cause, flight. Life gives resilience and regeneration. Land, though…" He patted the stone block he was sat on. "Strength. Strength and nothing but." They were back in front of the house, on the closest side of the expanse of grassland that started beyond the animal pens and went on until it hit the next biome. "Strength enough to kill a cow bare-handed, to punch through a wall, and certainly enough to lift this block." He hopped off it and stood to the side.

"You… you think I can…" Mira stammered, daunted. "How much does it weigh?"

"Getting on for three tons. But I don't expect you to lift it. Just move it a little."

Mira grit her teeth. _I can do this. I know I can. People have been passing these tests for… forever!_

/

By the time the other sisters reached Skani she'd stopped her screaming. Now she'd passed through fear and into a quite plateau of lucid terror.

"Skani." One asked. "Are you hurt? Is everything alright?"

Skani picked her word very carefully. "Yes. For now, all is well."

/

Kahl gently turned over Mira's wrist, noting the way the flesh lumped in odd places. "I've never see a series of bone fractures quite like these before."

"It's… nothing… I'm fine…"

The Landstrider raised his sole remaining eyebrow. "It's broken in three different places, and the fingers are a mess. Although I admire the stoicism, it really isn't necessary." He laid the arm carefully down on the table. They were inside the house now, in the one large wood panelled room that dominated the majority of the internal floorspace. Night was falling outside, and he had lit the hearth fire to light the room and keep his guest warm.

Not, it seemed, that she'd be saying for long.

"I need you to keep it still." Kahl got to his feet. "I'll be back in a minute."

Mira lightly prodded her am, and winced at the result. It hurt like nothing she'd ever felt before, worse even than when she'd burnt herself picking up a coal from the forge as a baby. That had been… sore. Really really sore. But this was worse. It was a stabbing kind of pain, mixed in with an acute ache. She'd really done a number on herself.

She sighed. Welp, that was it. Three months of travelling, all her possessions pawned to pay for food and passage, and for what? To break her arm on a… a goddam rock! She couldn't even pass the tests. Two tests failed out of two…

Wait. Life gave resilience. She wasn't resilient at all. Three tests failed. Out of two.

She could feel herself starting to cry, but she bit the impulse back. She hadn't cried in years, she wasn't going to start now.

Blinking repeatedly to keep the treacherous drops of saltwater back, she realised that it was going to be her last night not on the road home. Back to the smithy and a life that would be mostly just minding the forge until she had her first child in a couple of years, and then just killing time until time killed her.

So much for dreams, eh?

It wasn't a bad place for your greatest aspirations to curl up and die in, on reflection. Entirely oak apart from the windows and around the hearth in the back wall. The left hand side as you came in through the door opposite the fireplace was for sitting in, with the huge woollen cubes that were proverbially what landstriders relaxed on scattered around, as well as the bed she had slept in the previous night. There was also a small table that could seat two at a pinch and she had had her lunch at, which had been the last slice of pumpkin pie that she'd brought with her since she didn't like the idea of taking Kahl's food. Currently she had her arm resting on it.

The opposite side of the room- the right hand side- was all work. A row of ovens that pulled double duty as heavy-grade furnaces were arranged along the rightmost wall, double-stacked on top of each other. Some smouldered away, smelting iron ore into metal, and one was cooking fish for dinner, she knew. The rest were sat idle, cold. Apart from the furnaces, all that side of the room held was an iron barrel of water, an anvil, and a workbench, both of which were currently unused.

The rear of the room housed, along with the hearth, a ladder up which Kahl had left a few moments ago. He came back holding a glass bottle filled with a red liquid that glowed strangely under the firelight.

"Here. A potion of healing. It should be able to patch you back together."

Mira thanked him and took the potion, downing the entire thing in one go. There was a stabbing pain from her arm, but she managed to keep her only reaction to it a wince as her bones started to move under her skin, redistributing and re-fusing themselves to how they should have been

Kahl sat at the table opposite her. He leaned forwards, resting on his elbows. He looked decidedly uneasy. "So… how do you think today went?"

Mira couldn't meet his gaze. "Not… well. Awfully."

"Awfully is the word I would use. I admire your dedication and resolve, and I'll admit that it's normally those traits that cause the Dream." Kahl sighed. "I don't understand it, really. After the Last appears in your sleep-"

"The who?" Mira was looking at him now, quizzically.

"The Last. The fifth god. Light Land Life Law Last, it's domain is th-" he saw Mira's face had gone blank. "You never had the Dream, did you?"

"Of course I had a dream, otherwise I wouldn't be here!" she was angry now. She wasn't sure what at, but she was angry.

"Not a dream, the Dream. Capital D. the appearance of the Last and…" Realisation hit him like a sack of bricks. "You meant an aspiration when I asked before, didn't you?" Mira nodded, quietly seething. "It doesn't work like that. It's a factor, but…"

"But I have to be picked by some half-existent abstract… _thing_ that I've never heard of if I want to be part of the super-secret club! That's… that's…" She yelled out and buried her head in her hands. "What do I have to do? Is there anything I _can_ do? Tell Me What To DO!"

"You have to have a drive, and you have to be worthy. I'm sorry but it's not my decision."

"I… I have no worth?" Mira was properly crying now, but they were angry tears. She had never been so furious in her life. She wanted to lash out, to hurt someone, kill something. The anger was building up something fierce, effectively percolating out of her into the air. Kahl could feel it, essence of rage to an intensity he had rarely seen before.

"I didn't say that. You're smart, you're determined, and you have your life ahead of you." He reached forward and tilted her head up to look at him. "When you have the Dream, come back here. I'll teach you everything I know, alright?" the mist of anger around her started to fade away. "But until then, you have to go home. It's too dangerous here. Around me. You can stay the night, but tomorrow you need to go home."

/

Radel had taken over Skani's watch. There weren't many sisters strong enough to see into the void directly, and they were lucky to have a second on hand to take over down here in the lower levels.

_The Jhavoor coiled through the void, black on black, invisible to the untrained eye. A lazily snaking coil of…_

_Spiking, jagged blue lines, cracking like lightning. Coiling and twisting and…_

Radel screamed.


End file.
